F
ew games are as universally well respected by game developers asTetris. Often when a game becomes as popular asTetrishas, with versions for every system imaginable and untold millions in sales, gaming professionals start complaining about what a poor game it is.Mystis a good example of this. On its release, the title received near universal praise from the gaming press for being a fun adventure game in a beautifully conceived world. Game developers themselves, though not quite as enthusiastic, still thought it was a good game. Multiple millions of copies later with years spent on the best-seller charts, the same gaming press found reason to start hat- ing the game and its amazing continued popularity. Game developers are particularly loud in voicing their dislike for the game. Is the game worse now? No, of course not. Do141
gaming professionals, press and developers alike, resent the game for its sales? It would appear so.
But this is not the case withTetris.Tetrisconquered the world in terms of popular- ity, yet one is hard pressed to find anyone with a negative comment about the game.
What is it aboutTetristhat makes the game immune to criticism? It would appear some- thing about the game’s simplicity and clearness of design vision makes even the most cynical game developer concede the game’s greatness. Contrary to what happened withMyst, whenTetris was first released, most of the gaming press dwelled on the game’s origins in Russia and seemed underwhelmed, or at least unexcited, by the title’s gameplay. The game was so simple, its technology so lacking in razzle-dazzle that, per- haps, the press found themselves incapable of writing enthusiastically about the game
— at least at first. Now that the game is an undisputed classic, any game critic will be happy to tell you about the hundreds of hours he spent blissfully lost in the game.
Gameplay inTetrisis exceedingly uncomplicated. The game-world is a tall, rectan- gular, 2D box. Blocks appear at the top of the box. The blocks are made up of four squares arranged in every possible pattern where all the squares share at least one side with another square. The blocks then slowly fall to the bottom of the box, and players are able to move these blocks to the left and right, or rotate the piece in 90 degree incre- ments. Once the block hits an obstruction, either the bottom of the box or another piece, the block stops moving, players lose control of the block, and another piece that players can now control appears at the top of the screen. When the blocks at the bottom of the screen form a horizontal line across the rectangle, that line of squares disappears, and any squares above that line move down one row. The players’ game is over once incomplete rows of the blocks fill up the game-world rectangle and subsequent pieces are prevented from entering the play-field.
Puzzle Game or Action Game?
Tetrisis often referred to as a puzzle game, and for good reason.Tetrishas elements obviously reminiscent of a puzzle, with players needing to find how blocks best fit together. In this way the game is similar to a right-angle jigsaw puzzle, or any number of other “organize these geometrical shapes in this small space” puzzles. An even better comparison would be the traditional game pentomino, from which Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris’s designer, is supposed to have drawn inspiration. In pentomino, one must take twelve different shaped pieces, each made out of five squares, and fit them into a square box. One can see the similarities, but at the same timeTetrischanges the game into something entirely different, something entirely more challenging and compelling.
Pajitnov could have just as easily made a direct adaptation of pentomino to the com- puter, as many other developers have done for jigsaw puzzles or “sliding number”-type puzzles. This might have been an entertaining program, though perhaps not as fun as the actual game itself since part of the fun of pentomino is the tactile nature of manipu- lating the blocks. But by taking the puzzle and changing it into a game that could only happen on the computer, Pajitnov ended up creating a unique new game that is far more entertaining than the original.
Many times when members of the computer game intelligentsia refer to a game as being a puzzle game, they do so with derision. For them a puzzle game is one that
presents a series of static puzzles to players, puzzles that never change and never react to the players’ actions. They argue that a game must provide a reaction to the players’
actions and an opponent for players to compete against. Hence, the critics would say, these so-called “puzzle games” are not really games at all, but just puzzles. Further- more, often the puzzles found in these games have only one solution, further limiting the players’ interactive experience. Examples would include most all adventure games, such asZork,Myst, or evenGrim Fandango, games that, though they provide players with a world to explore and challenging puzzles to complete, do nothing to create a unique experience for players.
ButTetrisis never criticized for this shortcoming because it so brilliantly combines the mechanics of a puzzle game with the mechanics of an action game in order to create a truly compelling gameplay experience. Thus everyone who playsTetris, each time they play it, has a unique experience. One action game mechanic Tetris uses is the sense of an ever-approaching threat that players have to address in a limited amount of time. Just as most fiction revolves around dramatic tension, so do games, andTetrisis no exception. InCentipedethis threat is the arthropod winding its way down from the top of the screen. InTetrisit is the block dropping from above. If players do not move and rotate as well as determine an optimal placement for the piece before it reaches the bottom of the screen, it may get stuck in a location that blocks off lower rows from being completed, and players get one or more lines closer to ending their game. As gameplay progresses, the speed at which these blocks fall from the top of the screen increases, thus increasing the challenge for players and ramping up the difficulty over the course of the game.
Another similarity between Tetrisand action games that further distinguishes it from other puzzle games is the variety of gameplay situationsTetriscan create: each game played is unique. The play mechanics set up an infinitely large number of unique games, with each move players decide to make influencing the rest of their game. The way a piece is positioned into the blocks already at the bottom of the screen directly impacts where the next piece can be placed. Should players fill up the four-block-long
Tetriscarefully balances action and puzzle elements to create a unique gameplay experience. Pictured here, and throughout this chapter: classic mode inThe Next Tetris.
slot with only two blocks from an upside-down “L”-shaped piece? Or should they hold out, waiting for that desperately needed “I”-shaped piece? The “L” will not fill the slot completely, but no one knows how long it will be until the “I” piece arrives. In other cases players may have a number of different positions in which to put a piece, and must think ahead, figuring out if they put a piece in a given slot what sort of slots that will leave available for later pieces. Players constantly have to consider where future blocks will or will not be able to fit. Players may learn to recognize certain piece configura- tions, but every game is sufficiently unique that no players can be completely prepared for the challenges they may face.
Tetris as a Classic Arcade Game
There are many indications thatTetris is an example of what I call the “classic arcade game” form. This is despite the fact that it was not originally conceived for gameplay in the arcades (though its rampant popularity eventually led to its arrival there), and that it was created years after the classic arcade game form had stopped being used by professional arcade game developers. Looking over the list of classic arcade game qualities described in theCentipedeanalysis in Chapter 4, we can see just how Tetris fits the guiding principles of the form.
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Single Screen Play: Of course,Tetristakes place on only one screen. Players are able to view the entire game-world at one time and make informed decisions about what they want to do with a given piece based on that. There is no exploration component to the game, no way to really surprise players (beyond what piece appears next), so players have all the information they need to be successful at the game, and have nothing to blame but themselves for failure.Despite being developed years after classic arcade games had fallen out of style,Tetris’s gameplay embodies many of the design principles of that genre of games.
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Infinite Play:Tetris allows players to keep playing until, through their own bad decisions, the blocks reach the top of the box. Every game ends in defeat, and no one can truly say they have “beaten” the game. Players can always find ways to improve theirTetrisplaying ability. This is a crucial difference betweenTetrisand a traditional puzzle. Once players have solved a puzzle, if they remember how they did it the first time, the puzzle will no longer present any challenge to them. People usually do not enjoy doing puzzles multiple times, whereas a well-designed game can be replayed forever.Tetrisis just such a game.•
Multiple Lives: Unlike most classic arcade games, the originalTetrisimplementa- tion only offers players one life. Once the blocks reach the top of the box, the play- ers’ game is over. The design of the game, however, allows players to see that they are doing poorly while not defeating them instantly. As the blocks stack up at the bottom of the rectangle, players see the mistakes they are making and have time to figure out how to better line up the blocks before their game is over. So, whileTetris does not offer players multiple lives, it does give them a chance to learn the game well enough to achieve some minor successes before forcing them to start over.•
Scoring/High Scores:Tetrisuses a model for giving players a score and recording it in a high-score table, which is directly taken from the system used in games like AsteroidsorGalaga. Indeed, since the game cannot be defeated, it is the possibility of achieving a higher score that can become the players’ true impetus to play the game again.•
Easy-to-Learn, Simple Gameplay:Tetristruly excels in how simple and obvious its game mechanics are. Players really only need three buttons in order to play the game successfully, and these all translate into obvious results on the screen. This means that virtually anyone, regardless of how familiar they are with computer games, can walk up to the game and start playing it immediately. However, players will never be able to fully master the game due to the game’s ramping-up difficulty and the potential for infinitely long games.•
No Story:Tetrishas even less story than most classic arcade games, and is the case most often cited by people who want to point out that games do not need stories to be compelling for players. The only sort of settingTetrishas is its origins in Russia, which has been used for various aesthetic effects in the different incarnations of the game. The first PC version of the game, as published by Spectrum Holobyte, included backdrops behind the gameplay that involved different scenes from Russian life, and the music sounded vaguely Slavic in origin. But once people learned what a great gameTetriswas, subsequent implementations of the game, such as the one for the Nintendo GameBoy, had no Russian theme to them and had no setting or story at all. The game did not suffer one bit for this lack of story.Indeed,Tetris’s total lack of setting may actually be something that separates it from the classic arcade games, which all made an attempt to be grounded in a fantasy world of some sort, whether it was outer space in Galaga, insects in a garden inCentipede, or funky ghosts chasing a little yellow man around inPac-Man.
Tetrishas no such pretensions, and thus stands out.
The Technology
Another similarity betweenTetrisand classic arcade games is that none of those games relied on their technology to impress players. For CAGs, the graphics the arcade machines in the early ’80s could produce were so lackluster compared to what players would find in other media, such as movies or television, that players had to be drawn in by something else. As a result, the gameplay had to be truly captivating for these games to survive. Despite the fact that much more sophisticated graphics were available by the timeTetriswas released in the West in the late ’80s, the game did not need fancier graphics and stuck to a very simple 2D implementation.Tetris’s gameplay is so strong that it does not matter how technologically simple its implementation may be, the game is still wildly entertaining.
The implementation ofTetrisis so simple that many aspiring game programmers start out by making aTetrisclone. Indeed, numerous companies have attempted to add fancy graphical effects to the game, including making it 3D. The first of these was prob- ablyWelltris, a sequel of sorts toTetris, designed by Pajitnov. InWelltris, a 3D “well”
takes the place of theTetrisbox.Tetris-style pieces (though not always of four blocks) fall down along the sides of the well and must be lined up into rows on the bottom. The gameplay was considerably more complex without being particularly more fun or chal- lenging. As a result, players were uninterested, and went back to the simplicity of the original. Many subsequentTetrisknockoffs attempted to make “improvements” on the original, either through fancy effects or special pieces of various sorts. None of these attempts were particularly successful, and players continued to want to return to the original.
The attempts to add technological sophistication toTetrisfailed, not just commer- cially but also artistically. The enhanced technology added to these knockoff products was actually detrimental to the original game design, polluting its purity and making the game lose its elegance and fun in the process. Of course, the moral to the story is that enhanced technology is not necessarily beneficial to a given game, and game designers must be wary when the whiz-bang engine effects start to get in the way of what makes the game entertaining in the first place.
WhileTetrismay have not needed much in the way of computer technology to func- tion, it is worth pointing out that there could be noTetriswithout a computer.Tetrisis not a game adapted from a pen and paper or board game, but rather something that only can exist in a world carefully controlled and governed by a computer. As mentioned pre- viously, Pajitnov is said to have drawn his inspiration from the non-computer puzzle game pentomino. In adapting it to the computer, Pajitnov changed it into a form that could exist only on a computer. The descending of the pieces from the top of the screen at a steady rate, the way they can interact with the pieces already at the bottom of the screen, and the random way in which pieces become available to players are all opera- tions only a computer program could provide while still allowing for an entertaining experience for players. These are all tasks the computer performs expertly, and it was brilliant of Pajitnov to think to add them to his game.
Artificial Intelligence
All the game has in terms of AI is the random number generator that picks the next piece to enter the play-field. However, the game mechanics are such that this random number is enough to completely change each game, presenting players with unique challenges after every piece is dropped. Since the randomness ensures that players never know what the next piece will be, they are forced to play the piece in a way that is optimal for whatever one of the seven pieces comes along next. (Many incarnations of Tetrisinclude a “next” feature, which shows players the next piece that will come onto the play-field, a feature that does make the game a bit easier. Even when using this, however, players still do not know what the next-next-piece will be, hence they are still just making an educated guess as to where to stick the currently falling block.) If gameplay is about opposition, meaning an opponent providing a challenge to which players must react, and if in solitary computer games that opponent is the computer, then the fact that a random number generator provides all the challenge inTetrisdem- onstrates an important point. The AI the players face only needs to be as smart as the game mechanics require. An AI needs to present players with a situation that will chal- lenge them, and it really does not matter how the AI establishes that challenge. It could be as complicated as the AI for a deep strategy game likeCivilization, or it could be as simple as the random piece picker found inTetris. What matters is that the AI matches up with the game mechanics to sufficiently challenge players.
The random nature in which pieces arrive at the top of the screen might suggest to the reader that success atTetrisis just luck. If the pieces players get are random, how can different players’ scores be compared against one another? The key point to realize here is that, over time, the randomness of the pieces evens out. Just as die rolls in a board game even out over the course of the game, the random pieces passed to players inTetrisend up functioning as if they were not random at all. Since there are only seven types of pieces, none with more than four blocks, and since players (at least initially) have a large space in which to manipulate them, the randomness keeps the game from
Tetrishas a very limited artificial intelligence that randomly picks the blocks which fall into the play-field. Despite its simplicity, this AI provides the perfect challenge for the player.